Daneile Joyce "Dani" Shapiro is the author of five novels and the best-selling memoirs Slow Motion and Devotion. She has also written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and ELLE.Shapiro went to high school at the Pingry School, a prep school in New Jersey. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she was influenced by having Grace Paley as a teacher. Shapiro has also written for the screen, having adapted Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince for HBO in 1999. In 2000, she co-wrote a screenplay based on her memoir, Slow Motion, with her husband, journalist and screenwriter Michael Maren. She has been a professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University and an instructor at the New School and Columbia University.In a 2011 interview with the Jewish Ledger, Shapiro described being raised in a family with an Orthodox Jewish father and a mother from South Jersey who had grown up in a non-Orthodox home. Her parents agreed to observe Judaism and Shapiro attended a Solomon Schechter Jewish day school through 6th grade. After moving from New York City to Connecticut in her 40s, Shapiro recounts her "vestigial feeling" connecting her to Judaism were reawakened and that she "could no more reject my Judaism than reject being female, or being a mother, or a wife, or a writer, or any of the things that most define me".On October 20, 2013 she appeared on Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sunday on Winfrey's OWN to discuss her book Devotion.
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